equals

Saw a post on Twitter whining about how children these days view adults. "They think we are their equals and I'm here to tell you, I am not."

wow what an asshole

I don't think anything makes adults inherently superior to children. There's a lot of situational authority, for instance: Parents have authority over their own kids. Teachers have authority over their students. Employees at Walmart, Starbucks, etc. have limited authority over all patrons in their sphere of influence (e.g., "excuse me, this is an employee-only area").

But if I meet a random eight-year-old at the park one day, we meet as equals. Neither of us has any right to tell the other what to do. The old saying "You're not my dad" absolutely applies.

Frequently, an adult will have more skill/knowledge/experience than a child, and it would benefit the child to have some humility and a teachable spirit. But that’s not a specific adult-child dynamic. Anyone who wants to learn should have a teachable spirit. Also, it’s not true that adults always know better than children. Find an eight-year-old with an avid interest in dinosaurs, or rocks, or playing piano, and they surely know more than me.

I saw someone agreeing with OP and complaining about an incident where she left her laptop unattended at a coffeeshop and returned to find an eight-year-old playing on it like it was hers, with her parents looking on and not stopping her. Now that's definitely rude and improper, but it has nothing to do with child/adult hierarchy. Treating others as equals means respecting their things. That goes equally for a five-year-old's toys as a fifty-year-old woman's laptop. (Also, the fifty-year-old should know better than to just leave her laptop out in public.)

Basically I hope kids keep treating OP as an equal, because she deserves no more than that. Unless she's a teacher or something. But if she is a teacher, I bet that snooty attitude makes it unpleasant to be her student. Adjust your own attitude first, young lady. Anyhow I would hope kids outside of her class continue to treat her as an equal. Tear down that sense of entitlement.